Like a giant, concrete version of The Thing, Phoenix is a bloated tangle of tasteless architecture that never seems to stop ballooning outwards. .
Like a giant, concrete version of The Thing, Phoenix is a bloated tangle of tasteless architecture that never seems to stop ballooning outward.
The second block contained the abstract versions of the concrete items from the first block, and the concrete versions of the abstract items from the first block.
As in Experiment 1, the items were counterbalanced so that the abstract and concrete versions of the same item appeared in separate halves of the experiment.
The abstract versus concrete framing was a within-subject factor with the order of the items counterbalanced as in Experiment 1, so that the abstract and concrete versions of the same item would appear in separate halves of the experiment.
Participants made judgments about the abstract and concrete versions of the same items used in Experiments 1 and 2. However, rather than judging explanations, they rated the extent to which they believed psychotherapy would be an effective treatment and the extent to which they believed medication would be an effective treatment, on separate scales from 1 ("not at all") to 9 ("completely").
Because we are testing the effect of abstract versus concrete framing of the same behavior, we recruited a separate group of 40 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk to complete a pretest, measuring whether the abstract and concrete version of each behavior correspond to each other.
The apparently impossible roof, flapping clear of the walls like a nun's starched bonnet, is certainly a concrete version of dizzy rapture, but it is also comprehensible in anthropometric terms.
In section 1.4, a much more concrete version of an incompatibility argument was set out, which, rather than appealing to the mere existence of some evil or other, appealed to specific types of evil in particular, situations where animals die agonizing deaths in forest fires, or where children undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer.
And this requires a still rather concrete version of strategy to start with.
That is, participants rated both the abstract and concrete versions of each item, with the two versions in separate halves of the experiment in a counterbalanced order.
